It has been a difficult year in front of Destiny 2‘s high stakes competitive mode. Trials of Osiris is plagued by cheating, glitch exploits, and skewed matchmaking. Now it’s a hotbed of match fixing as players try to game the system to get the coveted rewards without doing any actual work, and Bungie has decided to take the whole thing offline for the third week in a row to tackle it.
Match solving issues first came to light around February 28th. Trials Report, a third-party site that analyzes player data, noted that of the 23.66 players who had gone flawless so far that weekend (meaning they got seven wins and no losses), 16,300 had five kills or less. 11,281 had none at all. The only way to log numbers like that is if opponents kill themselves. Bungie continued to take Trials of Osiris offlineIt subsequently canceled the following weekends Trials event tooOn March 11, the studio wrote on Twitter that it “solved this problem, ”And Trials would return the next day. And it did. And that also applied to the match fixing. And now it is offline again
How exactly does match fixing work in Trials of Osiris? YouTuber Lunarated explained it in detail in a video a few weeks ago, but essentially it revolves around teams indicating that they are willing to trade wins by equipping a particular piece of banner art (Cage) to their characters. When two of these teams are randomly compared against each other, they roll virtual dice to see which side is victorious and then proceed to the fixed match from there. The whole process is made smoother by the fact that Steam has a built-in virtual dice feature in the messaging app, making it much easier for random PC players to coordinate.
A complicating factor are Passages, cards that record winnings and losses and which are a prerequisite for playing Trials. If you lose three times, you must surrender or reset your passage, clearing any winnings. To get around this problem, players who lost a die roll and had to lose would simply withdraw from the matches, log in as a “dummy” character, and record the defeat there, saving all wins for their main character. The ability to come back from a match and rejoin is now at the heart of the match fixing controversy, and the thing Bungie seems to be focusing on trying to control it.
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“Due to an issue with the Fireteam Rejoin functionality, Trials of Osiris has been disabled for the remainder of the weekend,” Bungie wrote on Twitter. during the weekend“We will provide updates when available.” The studio did not respond to a request for comment about what the problem still is and whether it considers match fixing to be a fraud.
First reports at that time were that these match-fixing rings first blew in popularity with Steam users in China. But match fixing soon seemed to become more widespread than that. A lot of playing, after all Destiny 2 uses whatever resources are available to grind for the best loot as quickly as possible. Reserved exclusively for those who can rack up flawless winning streaks, Trials Adept weapons are some of the best in the game, so it’s not surprising that match fixing has trickled down into the category of SGA (Super Good Advice) on the game’s subreddit
It has also sparked an in-depth search within the Destiny community as to whether match fixing is hurting the game and whether Bungie has been too quick and strict to try and correct it. While Trials of Osiris is intended for high-level players, it does not constitute esport and is not associated with any larger type of competition. His rewards cannot be traded or sold, and there is an infinite supply of them. Someone who gets them from match fixing doesn’t take them away from those who normally compete.
The counter-argument, of course, is that players engaged in match-fixing harm the integrity of the mode, and of the greater loot, and devalue the significance of the exclusive weapons earned there, by potentially allowing any player with some patience to to acquire them. And so there are long wires about the game’s subreddit, in which she argues back and forth about whether Trials match-fixing is a scourge or a clever fix, and what Bungie should or shouldn’t do about it. The studio has already committed to it overhaul of Trials before the end of the year to “improve overall health” of the mode.
In the meantime, many players (myself included) will have missed another week of Trials gear. After recognizing the flaws in Trials last fall, Bungie implemented a new engram that would guarantee a weekly loot of the mod whether you win, lose, or jump off a cliff to not play at allHopefully that will not be banned either.